


Éléonore Called Cornélie

by antirococo_reaction (orphan_account)



Series: Oh Ye Women of Sparta [1]
Category: 18th Century CE RPF, French History RPF, French Revolution RPF
Genre: Family, Multi, Period Typical Attitudes, Period-Typical Sexism, Present Tense, Sensuality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-28
Updated: 2019-08-28
Packaged: 2020-09-28 13:04:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,534
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20426453
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/antirococo_reaction
Summary: Éléonore comes from a family of craftsmen, of shapers. She is her father's greatest work.





	Éléonore Called Cornélie

**Author's Note:**

  * For [billspilledquill](https://archiveofourown.org/users/billspilledquill/gifts).

> So this is an incredibly belated birthday gift for billspilledquill, because I find it impossible to work on two projects at the same time without ruining one or the other. Here you are, my friend, I hope you enjoy it.
> 
> **Please Read:**
> 
> In terms of relationships/pairings: this story and those that follow are independent of Les Saisons. This series is not, however, in any conventional sense, about a 'love story' or a romance between Robespierre and Éléonore- it honours a deep warmth and affection between them, and an intention to marry according to the expectations placed upon them, but I would characterise this as a story about the complexities of friendship and the possibilities of love in a society with rigid views regarding gender and sexuality. I am emphasising this heavily, so that readers can make an informed decision about whether to read the series or not.

When she hears the word ‘home’, the first thing Éléonore recalls is the smell of sawdust thick on the air. The workshop itself, that dingy, low-ceilinged nave in which her father once professed his faith in his craft, above which _he_\- Maximilien Robespierre- once toiled, is long since closed. They are all dead and cold: that room, these men whose faces still haunt her memory with infinite clarity. Dead and cold, just like the workshop: Papa, Maman, Maxime, Saint-Just, Philippe, Georges; only the traitor remains, and he- who once avoided her in the streets, pretending they never talked and laughed and broke bread together ‘round the family table- is far away in Belgium now. Even so, with all of them gone, when she occasionally catches the scent of sawdust in the street, the smell still sends time sliding abruptly backwards, restoring it all to life: a time when her steps and Saint-Just’s, her voice and Louis-Léon’s, were secrets bound in a little room and locked there by the noise of tools and laughter and labor below their feet; scant years of sickbeds and feverish brows and friendships and whispered confidences. Of moments she recalls with such clarity that, if she still had heart enough to lift a brush, she might fix them upon canvas to show all the world her secrets. And theirs.  
  
She imagines these things, knows the world is perhaps a little kinder to her now than it was in those years immediately following Thermidor, but still she will show them to no one. Such memories are hers, and _his_, and _theirs_, and are too easily misunderstood.   
  
More often, though, the scent of sawdust brings her back still further. She is a little girl in Papa’s workshop again, tentatively slipping amongst the sweating bodies of men and boys. They swirl ‘round one another with surprising grace: hard, sweat-slick bodies that press close and twist away. She is a little girl, but these great creatures make way for her in eddies of thick, warm air that make the sawdust dance like powdered gold through motes of lampshine and sunlight.  
  
_(Years later, a girl of twelve or thirteen, she will go with Maman to the market, there to see a fisherman with a barrel of fresh-caught river eels and her questing fingers will find their bodies like the skin of a man’s arm: smooth, for the most, a hard ripple ‘neath the skin; she will see another man slice open the belly of a trout and pull back the edges of the wound, and blush to think their flesh as sweetly pink inside as a boy’s flushed cheek.)_  
  
She is a little girl, yet she walks fearless through this closed world of blades and spikes, of solidity and commotion, delivering messages from the kitchen and the salon like an envoy to a foreign world. Her father employs other emissaries from places Beyond, too: more Beyond, perhaps, than the sphere of House and of Women. When they are not busy, it is these men who gather her close and tell her stories: Joseph, whose great dark eyes hold the depths of a constant, sombre worry, who cannot work a Saturday but is worth ten men in her father’s eyes for his skill; Michel, Joseph’s constant companion, who tells her tales handed down to him by his mother of women so courageous and intelligent and beautiful that when she first hears of Amazons she imagines them not as Europeans but as Africans (and only years later coming to hear of their taking of slaves, to wonder whether the quaver in Michel's voice were something other than the admiration she believed it to be as a child); soft-spoken Antoine who sings arias under his breath in their original tongue, and crafts for Éléonore a host of little wooden animals much to her delight. At the centre of this universe, Papa: bent over sheafs of blueprints or designs, laughing and chatting animatedly with Joseph and Michel over the fine work that could only be trusted to the best of men, turning his own hand to it too, at times, though he is a master carpenter and certainly wealthy enough that, were Papa any other man, he would do no more than bark orders. It is here that she returns when the scent of powdered wood summons thoughts of home. This she imagines: the whirl of sawdust through darts of rich, molten, summer sunlight, her father bent smiling over a raw chunk of wood he is transforming.   
  
_This,_ Éléonore thinks, when she is older again, _is our very nature: we Duplays are shapers._ Where others see a piece of wood, her father sees all the objects that might be coaxed from it: a table leg, a bedpost, an architrave, a rafter. His hands, the tools in them, move and he says, _Only God creates, Éléonore, I simply hew and sculpt_. And shortly after exiles her almost entirely from the workshop, because she is not turned merely to become a carpenter’s wife and age is changing her body and drawing eyes that are needed upon lathes. Maman, too, crafts and shapes. Where others see waste, her mother perceives with infinite love a thousand uses for all cast-off things: dresses turned to curtains and covers, pillowcases and lost buttons turned to dolls, the ends of candles melted down to make fresh ones, soup stock made from carrot peel, onion rind, garlic ends, mushroom stems and sweetened with bits and pieces of apple. Her parents are much the same with people: to Maman, each young domestic is like a bolt of raw cloth to be cut neatly to size and carefully stitched into shape, fit tight to their particular purpose, not a stitch gapped; to Papa, each apprentice is like a green sapling to be planted in good soil and trained to grow straight and strong, limbs pruned and shaped until they are ready to bear fruit.  
  
They are much the same with their children, too. It does not matter, as it well might in other families, that they begin as a family of girls. There is no disappointment, Éléonore knows, crouching attendant over their births: a craftsman, after all, works with the tools and the materials given. Rather, her parents look upon each of their children with the sort of loving dispassion with which a sculptor looks upon his rough chunk of marble: their excitement more in a shared vision of what might be hewn from it than simply in its being. They are quick to realise that Sophie is a Hestia or a Hera, and so it is she more than all the girls who receives their mother’s transcendent wisdom of hearth and home. Victoire’s seriousness, the mathematical precision with which she regards the world around her, lends itself to music lessons where the depths of her quiet soul might be plumbed by the lowest notes upon the pianoforte. Babet’s lightness of being, a nature which has in its happiness something of the spring breeze, and in its sorrows something of an autumn’s heavy mist, is all turned to conversation and kindness, to charity in every form: she is a gentle Aphrodite, easily mistaken as frivolous and simple, fearsome when her will is thwarted, but more often warm and coaxing. Of them all, Jacques is the most circumscribed simply by virtue of being The Boy: bound to wood and duty, ledgers and accounts; his gentle beauty and soft nature, which will in time come to mark him a Ganymede or a Hyacinthus, nonetheless serves to purchase him at least the latitude of time spent reading classics and investigating the nature of both humans and beasts.  
  
Éléonore knows, however- and they all do, though it is without any attendant resentment- that she is her father’s greatest work. She is the one whom he has planed and carved and turned, with no purpose but to make her admirable amongst women and a fit companion to the men he expects will love her: Papa first, then her brother Jacques and cousin Simon, and finally some distant, hazy figure Papa imagines and she awaits with something like longing and something else like terror. She is an Athena, perhaps: the best-loved child of Zeus, allowed to exceed all the bounds of her womanhood, cut loose from hearth and home. It is she who sits in the workshop, long after the men have gone home, to watch her father work alone. It is then he talks to her of history and philosophy and mythology and of many things she cannot immediately understand, but comes to under his patient tutelage. It is she who reads Corneille and translations of Plutarch and Plato along with her Rousseau, and who makes increasingly brave sallies into the terrain of debate across the dinner table. It is she who becomes her father’s pride, his exemplar and his ideal. In the form she takes, she sees a Galatea: not one of flesh or desire, but of virtue and the intellect. Cornélie, they come to call her: beginning as her father’s pet name, spreading ever outward until it steals her own. Until she is not Éléonore anymore, but this icon made of wood. 

**Author's Note:**

> There's very little information available (in English at least) about the Duplay's, but I've based my characterisation of the family on [Élisabeth Le Bas' memoirs as translated by estellacat](https://revolution-fr.dreamwidth.org/27841.html). Otherwise, as a broad source of more general information about the Duplay's, my reading list follows the same lines as my previous series. Also, given how little we know about Éléonore as a person in her own right, I have more or less assumed certain rumours/stories- for instance, that she studied painting- to be true, even where there is little evidence to back them up. I will acknowledge, however, that they should not be taken as settled fact (as far as I am aware).
> 
> The traitor that Éléonore mentions is Jacques-Louis David, who avoided the events of 9-10 Thermidor and later betrayed Robespierre's memory by claiming that they had never been personal friends and agreeing with the post-Thermidor rhetoric around Robespierre's 'tyranny'.
> 
> Louis-Léon is how Saint-Just signed his name (when using first names at all) during the period when Éléonore knew him: see my post on this topic [here](https://jacobin-j.tumblr.com/post/186697953561/some-reading-on-saint-justs-names)
> 
> **...when she first hears of Amazons she imagines them not as Europeans but as Africans...**: Michel is telling her stories of the Mino, known in English as the [Dahomey Amazons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dahomey_Amazons). The connection between the Amazons and the Mino was made in European texts at the time, however Éléonore is working in reverse of the typical cultural standard given that she hears of the Mino before she hears of the Amazons of Greek mythology. Her framing of the Amazons as 'European' is inaccurate, but in keeping with the time and the level of access she has to knowledge at the time of these stories being told (e.g. while she is still a young child).
> 
> **Jacques Duplay** This utterly odd reference, which seems to be referring back to prison records from the Duplay's arrest in Thermidor, to Jacques as 'Robespierre's Ganymede' is [here](https://www.appl-lachaise.net/appl/article.php3?id_article=6354%22). This is _not_ a trustworthy source, however nor would I be particularly surprised- in the context of Thermidor- for homophobic slurs to be hurled at a young, 'pretty' boy known to have connections with Robespierre.


End file.
